Sidney

Of all my family members, my mother's brother, Sidney,was one of the most gentle.
There is no telling how much he saw or how much he has endured over the years.
I have been told of the severe beatings he endured from his father.
I remember his severe case of acne, the reason he always had his hands on his face.
I remember hearing of the cruel names they called him as a teenager. Hamburger Face....
I remember tales of the many fights he got into as a youth, defending the honor of his sisters or retaliating to the cruelness of other school children.
My mother told me of the many times he received incredible blows to the head...sometimes from a fist
...sometimes from a piece of wood....many times from hitting his head on a sidewalk curb.
Sidney was a fighter. It seems that his clothes were so ill-fitting as a child that he would hold up his pants with one hand and fight with the other.
At some point in his late teens or early twenties, something really snapped.
Sidney began spending time in a mental hospital. In and out of Jackson State Mental Hospital near Baton Rouge and in and out of the stupor caused by shock treatments and experimental drugs.
The doctors wanted to give him a lobotomy, and that's where my grandmother, Emma, drew the line.
Sidney heard voices...lots of them. It's when he would begin sharing these voices with family members that things went bad for him.
And then there were times he would go to bars and begin preaching the message God had given him. I suppose not many people want to be evangalized while bellying up to the bar. And when the police were called in to put down the disturbance, Sidney would be locked away.
Once he told one of my aunts that the voices were telling him to cut up people and put them into a pot.
One of my cousins had spit in his face that day which likely set him off.
That was another stay at Jackson. How many times they fried his brain, no one knows.
We would just pile in a car and visit him some weekends.
We always brought fruit, sandwiches, cold drinks, egg salad, Ritz crackers, and lots ot cigarettes.
Most of the time I couldn't eat any of the food because Sidney was hard to watch. He would cram his mouth with food...again and again. And go off to throw up, and then return to eat more.
We tried not to notice, but I can still hear Emma suggesting that he slow down.
"Sidney, all this food is for you. So, slow down and enjoy it."
"Honey, don't make yourself sick."
Sidney was hungry for something and the food wasn't doing the job. Neither were the cigarettes that he violently smoked...lighting one from another....again and again.
His hands were yellowed and burned because he would forget he was holding a lit Camel.
When he was deep into the drugs or shock treatments , he was on another planet. And the verbal communication from this far off place boiled down to a very spacey "yes" or "no". It was like the positive or negative he comminicated was only given to shut the questioner up.
Questions were not a good thing for Sidney.
Sidney seemed so full of fear...especially fearful about what had happened to him at the hospital. He would beg not to be sent back because of the rubber hoses used on patients in the showers.
My uncle once shared with me the reason for using rubber hoses....no marks.
As we would leave the hospital, he would beg us to take him with us, and he would stand at the gate dressed in kakais waving to us.
It would break Emma's heart, and she would cry.
I loved Sidney, his smile, his insane little laugh.
He would play games with me taking special delight in beating me. The checker games he and I shared are good memories, and the puzzles we put together, the card games....all of it.
Sidney loved to help me study my spelling and took special pride when I brought home a good grade on something he had drilled me on.
The Sidney I remember was soft-spoken, kind, full of fun....and always ready to smile.
I see him with his curly, sandy hair, playful, like a puppy.
He made not secret that he despised his father, Joseph, who would never come by our apartment when Sidney was there.

What Sidney wanted was peace, and he has never gotten it that I know of.
Today he's in his late 70's and lives in a supervised home outside of New Orleans. He recognizes no one, just sitting in a rocker....smoking...off somewhere I have never been.

Uncle Joe, my grandfather...

My grandfather, Joseph, died at Charity Hospital when I was about 11 or12. He was hit by a white Cadillac on North Robertson, right off of Broad.
Memories?
The smell of tobacco all over the man, and the drool of it on the corner of his mouth.
The hard black eyes, cold.
The bitter laugh that followed cruel humor.
The stories he carried of me, of everyone, were always the worst.
It's strange the details that my mind wraps around and grips.
Joseph Wallace, my mother's father, had moved south from Philadelphia long before I was born and transformed himself from a Wakeley to a Wallace.
There were stories that his first wife died in an isolated farm house in New Jersey.
I shiver when I think about the descriptions of her trying to give birth on a kitchen table...a breached birth. And Joseph trying to help her.
I shiver at the thought of him hacking with a kitchen knife, trying to do some good. And then watching as she bled out.
The Joseph I knew was a hard man....a man with hard memories.
He called me "Bloodhound" as long as I knew him, my mother was "Mutt". It would be many years before I got the full story behind these names...and why he insisted that I not call him "grandpa".
"I'm not your grandfather! Calll me Uncle Joe!"
You name it, Joseph was bitter and angry and disappointed about it.
He trusted no one, always looking for a motive.
That may be why he would push me away when I would try to crawl into his lap.
It also may be why, as a pre-schooler, I hit him in the head with my toy fire truck while he was knapping.
So much of his life was broken, even down to the bottle of vitamins he carried in his pocket when the car hit him. If he had not gone to the drugstore to buy some Carter's Liver Pills, a plug Brown Mule, and the vitamins, he may have lived long past his 81 years.
Joseph's wake at the House of Boultman on St. Charles Avenue was magnificent. He had been paying on that burial policy with this funeral home for years.
The old man went out big.
I can remember riding in one of those huge black limos to the Garden of Memories on Airline. There are also memories of my grandmother, Emma, making everyone promise, even swear, that they would never bury her body near him. The plot next to him is still empty.
I had never seem my grandmother like this. I was in awe. This was a lady with a head of steam that I didn't recognize.
Emma had many of the Spirit's gifts. Whatever prompted her do this on the day of Joseph's funeral? Maybe more of the same that caused her to live apart from him for so many years.

The Depression

The people in my family who survived the Great Depression have always struggled to throw anything away.
There seems to be a fear that some insignificant piece of something that has been tossed on the heap will be exactly the thing that is needed. But it will be gone.
The sadness, the guilt, the blame, the anger, the sense of loss? They are all that will remain.
But the need? It will still be there. Always.
My mother, my aunts, my uncles, all those survivors of the pre-war years....
They hesitated to let anything go.
Who wanted the responsibility to throw something away that may one day be needed?
Who could bear that weight?
It was a materialism of the broke and broken.
It manifested itself in the hoarding of chipped china, out-dated, out-worn, out-grown clothing, and things harvested from the curbs of the big houses in the Garden District.
My mother's father, Joseph, had his "route"....his regular rounds up and down St. Charles Avenue which he would haunt at night. Joseph carried around a strong sense of disapproval of the rich fools who gave his route an energy and purpose.
Memories of crying sick or hungry children who couldn't be treated or pacified.
Memories of those same children walking along the tracks picking up coal dropped from railroad cars.
Memories of chamber pots filled with urine-ice in freezing bedrooms.
Memories of children naked in their beds waiting for their only change of clothes to be washed.
And the rich? They were the fools whose trash was gold.

Even the rhymes that my grandfather taught me as a child were full of anger and bitterness...
"Tammy was a Welshman.
Tammy was a thief.
Tammy came to my house
And stole a leg of beef.
So I went to Tammy's house,
And he was laying in bed.
So I picked up the marrow bone,
And hit him over the head."

The Depression was a disease. Something my family had survived...but a cancer in remission that could rise up again and again. And the fear of it fed on my family and the way they lived.
I remember my people as loud, harsh, fierce and full of rage...and hungry.
They grabbed, they snatched, they wrestled. They survived.
And they held on to everything....especially the memories.

Aaron

I encounterd Aaron's laundry before I ever met the man who filled those huge undershirts and jockey briefs.
Roberta, my mother's oldest sister, did the wash on one of those old washing machines with the wringer on the top, and then filled the lines in the yard with all of the stained wash. Bleach didn't really do much for Aaron's underwear.
Aaron was massive, the whole family was.
Eating was an event that went down in huge quantities all around. Mibby, Aaron Jr. (Junie), Roberta, and Aaron were capable of knocking down two dozen pork chops. Six per person, along with everything else.
And then there was Aaron's RC Cola. Cases of it. He drank more soft drinks than any person I have ever met.
Aaron worked nights along the river as a security guard. But during the day, he slept, and his sleep was something that Aunt Bert guarded religiously.
Nobody would dare wake the sleeping giant.
And in the afternoons when he did emerge from his bedroom, he would wander the house in his briefs with an RC in his hand, directing the meal prep for the family's daily Olympic eating binge. And lthen line up the lunch that would carry him though the night.
Bert and Aaron never shared a bedroom during the time that I knew them. Aaron's room was quite a place. There was his bed, dresser, etc., and then there were cases and cases of the many things that
Aaron stole from the ships and warehouses each night.
Cases of expensive French perfume, watches, cartons of ballpoint and fountain pens, cases of liquor, prescription drugs...all sorts of stuff.
He was part of the corruption that blanketed and soiled the New Orleans' warehouse district...and probably still does.
Junie would brag and call his daddy a "liceman". But Aaron a a thief.
There was a lot of it that found it's way into the homes of Bert's family.
It was insane. The costly jewelry, the watchers, the perfume...all of it in the midst of shabby governemtn housing where there was so much real need that was never met.
And some of it Aaron sold or bribed people with.
Aaron never got caught, but there were close calls. Times when paranoia prompted him to move his stolen stash to the houses of family members.
Once Aaron came home with a mess of tokens for the toll bridge over the Mississippi. How it all went down was never clear to me. But I do remember how sure everyone was that Aaron had finally done it.
While Aaron was a work each night, Bert and the kids would go to various Pentecostal meetings and join in with Charismatic experiences that spoke to both their spiritual and emotional needs.
And increasingly, Bert would speak out Aaron's sinful ways and the influence it had on their kids. But that never stopped the flow of perfume, jewelry, and other trinkets he stole from finding their way to her dressing table.
And it never stopped her from inviting family members over to raid Aaron's stash while he was away at work. She said that there was so much that he'd never notice. And he never did.
I wonder about Aaron. Why was he so ridiculed as a pig and a thief by Roberta and the rest of the family? ....and yet we all gladly received what he stole.
The St. Thomas Housing Project, maybe the whole Irish Channel, was full of Aaron's, grabbing at something or anything that would fill their lives...even for a moment.
Maybe a lot like Mardi Gras. Those glass beads flying through the air seem a lot more significant only because of the many hands reachi grapple for them.
On closer examination, they're cheap...tacky...with no real purpose. But people have been crushed under floats, crippled.....
Aaron was always ready for someone to throw something his way.
"Throw me somethin', mista'!"